I used to work in retail. One of the other salesmen, a stocky ginger fellow, was talking with a group of asians about some camera equipment, when a member of the group suddenly reached out and stroked my coworker's hair. Then, so did the rest of them. Red continued with the sale, because what the hell else do you do, but we shard a look of "WTF?" across the digital imaging display.

This is a very bad explanation, and the fact that it is currently the top response to this post is symptomatic of the kind of financial/economic illiteracy that allows the financial sector to run rampant. People don't know what "Wall Street" does, so they cant make informed decisions on their own finances, much less cast an informed vote.

On a very, very basic level, Wall Street is all about connecting lenders with borrowers. A share of stock, or a corporate bond, or most other financial instruments, is essentially a way for a company to raise money. They get immediate cash flow, and the buyer an IOU. The terms of the IOU differ for each kind of security, but that's the core of it. This is good and useful to society because businesses need money to pay workers and build factories, and raising a little bit of money from many people is easier than finding one person with all the cash you need. It's the original crowdfunding.

Where things get weird is that when you operate on the scale of Wall Street or other major financial markets, the values of the IOUs tend to get a bit divorced from the values of the actual borrowers. Lenders can trade IOUs, which doesn't directly benefit the borrower, though it affects the value of future sales of IOUs. This means both initial lenders and borrowers have a vested interest in keeping the theoretical value of the IOUs high, leading to... Fraud may be too strong a word, but it's not that far off. This can be exacerbated by deregulation which allows borrowers and middle-men to package the IOUs in interesting and misleading ways that can cause lenders (shareholders and buyers of financial instruments) to think they're getting a good deal when really, they're buying crap. People can and have put their whole life savings into worthless IOUs and lost everything when everyone else realized they were worthless, too.

Basically, Wall Street isn't pure evil, but it's not unmitigated good either. We need to understand what's going on in order to make sound financial and political decisions, and glib responses to questions like this serve no one but the people who profit from manipulating our ignorance.

Well, lots of reasons, but let's hit the big three: military, economic, and political. First off, most of the ways of destroying a planet/star (relativistic bombardment, nova bombs, grey goo, antimatter, planetbreaker nukes, whatever they used in The Forge of God, etc.) either aren't all that long range, or can be defended against by an opponent with equivalent technology. If you have to achieve naval victory in local space before you can deploy your planetbusters, you might as well get a useable planet for your effort. You get resources, living space, pretty flowers, and forward staging areas for the ongoing struggle.

Which ties into the economic reason for ground combat- the ground itself is worth something. Even if you can build deep space habitats and mine all your resources from asteroid belts and comets, it's a lot easier (and cheaper) to live on a warm ball of mud. Blowing up the universe's limited supply of habitable worlds is sort of shooting yourself in the foot.

Assuming that neither of those applies to your situation, you might still want to avoid planetary demolition because it's just downright un-neighborly. Unless you and your enemy exist in a vacuum(ba-dum), or the each of you outmatch the rest of the known universe by a margin that makes their participation irrelevant, blowing up planets is the sort of thing that will tend to polarize neutral factions against you.

I think the point of that first post was that the content of his friend's speech was troubling. OP wasn't complaining that his friend was free to say things OP disagreed with, he was reacting to the content of his speech. That's the whole point of free speech.

It's so weird to me to realize that near instantaneous worldwide communications predated cars. How far back does this kind of global communications network go? Would poor and middle class people have reasonable access to it?

If I recall correctly, as long as there's no altered mental status, any adult can refuse transport as long as they sign a waiver. Even if the patient is altered, in NYS at least, I believe a LEO has to supervise any forcible transport. As in, the cop has to apply the cuffs and ride in the ambulance.

I'm going for a second degree in engineering, and I currently work in maintenance in a recognizable automotive parts manufacturer. I would advise you to be careful taking a job that will be perceived as "lesser" than what you trained for or currently have. It'll look odd on a resume and may be a red flag for future employers. If you can spin it as following a passion or gaining experience in the field, it might not be a dealbreaker. That said, "mechanical technician" is a broad job title. In my plant, that's what we call the tool and die machinists. At our test facility down the road, the same title different job code is used for the mechanics who set up the test engines and vehicles. I have friends who work in other industries and their "mechanical technicians" are basically just senior maintenance people. But they universally get paid less than the engineers, so there's that, too.

To be fair, a lot more jobs than you might realize require you to provide your own tools. Mechanics, construction workers, skilled tradespeople, farm laborers depending on the farm, food service workers if you're in back of house, all have to buy tools or attire to do their jobs.

I think the point being made about education wasn't necessarily in a classroom sense. You make a good point about cooking being an art rather than a science, but someone still has to teach you the fundamentals. All those folks who manage to make wholesome, low-cost meals without formal training in nutrition still got an education. Their parents and grandparents taught them how to cook and what to eat.